It would be a tough choice, but Gandhiji would weigh the factors, and decide that women are still more enslaved by society and human ignorance more than by race today.
He would think: The world will be a better place with a woman as a leader of the world's most powerful and influential nation. It is just a fact that the world will benefit more today with a woman being a leader of the United States than an African-American man...If there was an African-American woman candidate though....hmmm....
In a letter written to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur from Wardha on 21, October, 1936 Gandhi writes, "If you women would only realize your dignity and privilege, and make full use of it for mankind, you will make it much better than it is. But man has delighted in enslaving you and you have proved willing slaves till the slaves and the slave-holders have become one in the crime of degrading humanity. My special function from childhood, you might say, has been to make women realize her dignity. I was once a slave-holder myself but Ba proved an unwilling slave and thus opened my eyes to my mission. Her task was finished. Now I am in search of a woman who would realize her mission. Are you that woman, will you be one?"
link http://www.mkgandhi.org/...
Think of the empowerment that middle eastern women will feel.
Think of the hate and digust some of the Arab men and the Taliban will feel, and the women of Pakistan will rise to the occasion.
All emotions aside, it is more than time for the United States to have a woman leader or an African-American man, I would take either or both.
The author of this is a Gandhi scholar,studying Mahatma Gandhi for 35 years, a westerner who lived in India/Pakistan for 7 years, and fluent in Hindi/Urdu. He had the chance to be Indira Gandhi's acupuncturist which he refused to be.
Firstly, Gandhi did not refuse the treatment but his wife did, and not for being alien (could have been an added incentive though!). It was because penicillin was a fungal product and for an orthodox Gujju it was equivalent to meat. Gandhi had no qualms about alien medicine, in fact he was a medical corps cadet during the Boer War.